


don't wanna be nowhere

by cori_the_bloody



Category: Never Have I Ever (TV)
Genre: Banter, F/M, I was doing a three sentence prompt meme over on tumblr and someone gave me the prompt pool, One Shot, Unresolved Tension, and the idea that inspired merited more than three sentences so here we are, anyway!, ben being a bookworm, so it features things like, this is set during devi's stay at ben's house in 1.10, you know. all my favorite things.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:06:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25681033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cori_the_bloody/pseuds/cori_the_bloody
Summary: “Sorry that I’m not super keen to hang out at the sight of one of my most embarrassing moments,” she snaps.“That’s not true,” Ben says, and her lips part in surprise. That is, until he adds. “That fight at my birthday party? Doesn’t even crack the Devi Top Ten.”
Relationships: Ben Gross & Devi Vishwakumar, Ben Gross/Devi Vishwakumar
Comments: 24
Kudos: 101





	don't wanna be nowhere

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, Bethany, for reading this over!
> 
> This is the first thing in a long freaking time that I sat down and banged out all in one sitting. I know it's not terribly long, but it still felt good as heck. Ready to fight god, probably. Hope that energy is reflected appropriately in the fic.

Devi slaps her chemistry textbook closed, wondering if Ben took as long as she has to balance all the chemical reactions Mrs. Paloma had assigned.

She stands from the floor and pokes her head out of the guest room.

“Hello?” she asks the hallway. It offers up nothing in return. “Ben?”

She finds him out by the pool, legs dangling over the edge and a paperback in his hands. She’d bet her perfect grade in Mr. Shapiro’s class that it has something nerdy on the cover, like a space station or a Viking.

“Working on your sunburn, Gross?”

He starts at the sound of her voice and then glances over his shoulder. “I don’t get it,” he says to her. “You have all the grace of an inebriated baby giraffe, and yet you’re constantly sneaking up on me.”

“Yeah, I think your house eats background noise or something. I bet if we set up a white noise machine in every room, we would create a portal to another world with all the rejected soundwaves.”

“Interesting theory,” he says in a way that makes it clear he thinks she’s insane. He turns his attention back to his book.

“What are you doing out here?” she asks after checking her phone to find no new notifications.

“Thought that was obvious.”

“It’s going to be dark soon. Why not just read inside?”

He looks back at her, letting the book fall into his lap. “I don’t know, David. I guess I just prefer being able to see the sky. What’s with the third degree?”

At the beginning of the year, she’d probably have felt all prickly and challenged over his tone. Now that he kinda accidentally gave her a key to Ben-speak, she understands the answer for what it is.

She glances over her own shoulder at his empty house. It’s got to be the swankiest solitary confinement in the world, but…

“No,” she says, turning to find him watching her. Their eyes meet. “I get it.”

He swallows, his throat bobbing, before he picks his book back up.

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other.

“You gonna keep standing there or what?” he asks, patting the concrete next to him.

“Sorry that I’m not super keen to hang out at the sight of one of my most embarrassing moments,” she snaps.

“That’s not true,” he says, and her lips part in surprise. That is, until he adds. “That fight at my birthday party? Doesn’t even crack the Devi Top Ten.”

“Alright, asshole,” she says, going to sit down despite herself. She shivers as the water sloshes around her calves.

Ben nudges her with her elbow. “Come on, people barely even remember it. They’ve all moved onto that rumor that Trent is catfishing Eric on Tinder.”

“Great. It’s really comforting to know that I’m just barely less pathetic than Eric Perkins.”

“Sounds like a silver lining to me.”

Devi snorts, and he grins, looking really pleased with himself.

She feels squirmy all of a sudden, and something about that urges her to say, “Can I tell you something about that night?”

He’s watching her. She can feel his eyes even though she’s staring determinedly at the shell pink polish on her toes as she drags her feet through the water.

“Go for it.”

“Paxton kissed me after he drove me home.”

“Oh.”

His response lands with a thud in the pit of her stomach, and she tells herself it’s just because she can’t tell Fabiola or Eleanor right now and nothing short of squealing with her best friends would be an appropriate follow-up to such a serious confession.

“It, uh, it was my first, actually.”

She looks up to see his reaction—to see if he’s finally getting the gravity of what she’s telling him—only to find him scrambling to his feet and tugging off his shirt.

“Whoa, Gross, what—?” She starts to ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing when he dives into the pool, splashing her and his own book with water.

When he surfaces, she blinks at him, unimpressed.

“Come in,” he says.

She widens her eyes. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“Prove you’re not chicken,” he says, slicking his dripping hair up off his forehead. “And to make peace with my pool.”

She almost tells him to shove it. She almost calls him out on how weird he’s being. What she actually does, though, is stand.

“Turn around,” she says to him, reaching for the hem of her t-shirt.

“Oh, I—” He looks surprised, and that makes her smile triumphantly. “Okay.”

She can’t decide if she’s grateful or not that she’s currently wearing her rattiest sports bra. But she’s not about to sit and mull it over. Once she’s tossed her shirt over toward the door, she takes a running leap into the pool.

Ben spins around just as she breaks the surface.

“Now what?” she asks him.

He shoves at the water, sending a wave of it up her nose.

“Dammit, Ben!”

He snickers, but then sobers a moment later. “Congrats, I guess.”

She doesn’t need to ask what he’s congratulating her for.

Even while hating herself for pushing so hard, she can’t quell the desire to talk about it more—maybe she’s hoping that recounting it will make it feel realer—so she says, “He came to my house…my mom’s house. The day after.”

“Guess that means you’re getting a second chance, huh?”

Ben’s voice is low and rough, and suddenly Devi’s aware of the way they’re kind of drifting around each other in a loose circle. Her foot brushes his calf, and his eyes fall to her lips. She watches his expression shift in the fading sunlight, taunted by what secrets the lengthening shadows might be hiding.

She realizes she’s staring at his mouth, too, when his tongue swipes at the water droplets clinging to his skin.

“Why do you never have Shira over here?”

The question bursts out of her, making both of them cringe.

“I do,” he says, planting his feet and scratching at the back of his neck. “Sometimes.”

Devi lets herself float away from him. “If I had a big, parentless house, I’d have my girlfriend over all the time. Or—whatever. You know what I mean.”

“Great,” he says, flopping down into a backstroke. “Feel free to have Paxton over any time.”

“Really?” she asks, trying not to let herself be fully distracted by the fact that the muscles in Ben’s arms are kinda way more in-your-face than she’s ever realized before.

He stops swimming away from her long enough to pull a face. “No, I’m not—I mean—”

She sighs. “Relax, dude. I was kidding.”

“I guess you could, though,” he says up at the blue-black sky. “Just, um, text me first, maybe.”

“Ask permission,” she says, nodding. “Got it.”

“I was thinking more as a warning,” he says. “So I can be literally anywhere else in the world.”

“What if I hang a sock on your front door?”

“What if I tell my parents you’re trying to poison Patty and get you thrown out?”

“No way that’d work,” she says to him, settling on her back and smiling up at the sky. “Both Patty and your parents like me way better than you.”

“I don’t know about that,” he says, and she can tell he’s smiling, too, even though she hears the sadness lurking at the edges of his voice. “It’s not like they’ve been hanging around any more than usual since you got here.”

“Or maybe they have and we just can’t hear them. You know, since your house is a void.”

“This theory of yours is nightmare bait, David.”

“Too bad no one will hear you when you wake up screaming.”

“Alright, that’s enough.”

The water moves in disrupted waves up over her stomach, and she realizes that he’s swimming over to her a second too late. His hands are on her shoulders and he’s pushing her underwater before she can even open her eyes.

She lashes out with her whole body, twisting out of his grasp and then gasping in air when she resurfaces.

“Are you trying to kill me?”

“So what if I am?” he asks, waggling his eyebrows. “No one will hear your screams.”

“Now I’ve been traumatized in this pool twice,” she says, sloshing her way over to the stairs.

“Oh, come on,” he says. “I had you under for, like, two seconds.”

She wrings out her ponytail, shivering a little as the fresh, night air raises gooseflesh along her stomach and the tops of her thighs. “I was referring to seeing your bare chest, actually.”

His whine of protest carries to the threshold of the backdoor. And even though stepping inside makes a totally different shiver crawl across her skin, she decides she kind of likes being the person with whom Ben Gross shares his creepy void.


End file.
